"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Friday, November 30, 2012

Yesterday, the Obama administration unveiled its proposal to avert the looming fiscal showdown. The plan
included $1.6 trillion in increased taxes on the rich over the next
decade, $400 billion in savings to be found in Medicare and other social
programs, $50 billion in stimulus spending to begin next year, and an
end to current debt ceiling rules.This proposal is not new. It reflects the very policies Obama not only put forth in 2011, as Kevin Drum noted,
but also campaigned on extensively this year. They are the very
policies that the American public voted for in November when they
granted Obama another four years. Exit polling also showed that 60 percent of voters wanted to see income taxes increased for wealthy Americans.However, these facts didn’t stop conservatives from acting as though
Obama had proposed the “Kill All The Puppies Act of 2012″. Here are five
overreactions to Obama’s plan:

Worse than surrender in the Civil War: Leading conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer likened
Obama’s proposal to the terms of surrender offered to Confederates in
the Civil War, only the president’s deal was worse. “It’s not just a bad
deal, this is really an insulting deal… Robert E. Lee was offered
easier terms at Appomattox and he lost the Civil War,” said Krauthammer.

Out of a fairytale: Writing in her Wall Street Journal column, Kimberley Strassel lambasted
the plan as “something out of Wonderland and Oz combined.” She went on
to argue that Obama wasn’t negotiating in good faith. “The most
frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an
error.”

“Nothing good can come of negotiating further”: RedState editor Erick Erickson, whose counsel congressional Republicans regularly seek, advised
the GOP to pack up, go home, and take the country over the cliff.
“Nothing good can come of negotiating further,” Erickson wrote. “The GOP
should pass what they want and promptly go home. Let the Democrats stay
and sort things out. Dive.”

“I’d walk out”: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, said that his Party ought to walk out
of negotiations, saying Obama’s proposal was solely meant to “provoke”
House Republicans. Speaking on his morning show, Scarborough detailed
what his reaction would have been had he been in negotiations: “I would
have said, ‘We’re all busy people, this is a critical time, if you’re
going to come over here and insult us and intentionally try to provoke
us, you can do that but I’m going back to work now.’ And I’d walk out.”

“Congress should dive headlong off fiscal cliff”: After a lengthy column
detailing how going over the fiscal cliff “would shock the economy,”
Daily Caller editor Tucker Carlson advised GOPers to “dive headlong off
fiscal cliff” following Obama’s proposal. “Republicans don’t have a lot
of good choices right now,” Tucker wrote. “They might as well try it.”

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Republicans have rejected President Obama’s opening budget bid. In a Capitol meeting with House Speaker John Boehner Thursday,
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner submitted the Obama administration’s
proposal for addressing medium term deficits, and avoiding across the
board tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year.Republicans called the proposal outlandish and brushed it aside as
unserious. But it’s almost entirely comprised of policies Obama
campaigned on and included in his budget for the current fiscal year.
And by satisfying GOP demands that Obama offer up a plan that includes
spending cuts, it paints Republicans, who have been reluctant to specify
their own Medicare cut proposal, into a tight corner.The White House formally proposes to increase tax revenues by
$1.6 trillion over 10 years by increasing top marginal income tax rates
and taxes on both capital gains and dividends, and by limiting tax
deductions for top earners, according to Republicans. Obama proposes to reinstate the estate tax at its 2009 level, as well as patch the alternative minimum tax.The administration asked Republicans to boost the economy, too, by
either extending the payroll tax cut, or replace the holiday with a
similar stimulus, such as the Making Work Pay tax credit in the Recovery
Act. They also want to extend emergency unemployment benefits.On top of that, the administration proposes $50 billion in new
infrastructure spending, as well as a mortgage refinancing program. The
plan would prevent automatic reimbursement cuts to physicians who treat
Medicare beneficiaries, and would eliminate congressional control over
the debt limit altogether. In exchange, the administration proposes a tax reform proposal
consistent with its $1.6 trillion in new tax revenues taken from top
earners, and to cut 10-year deficits overall by $4 trillion, including
$400 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid in Obama’s budget.

Texas-based Hostess Brands Inc. asked a judge on Wednesday to approve an additional $1.9 million in executive bonuses, according to The Associated Press, saying the money is needed to keep top managers on as the company sells off all its assets. The now-defunct company, which rakes in more than $2.5 billion in annual sales, closed its doors earlier this month amid a strike by its unionized workers
who refused to accept wage cuts. Despite still-heavy sales, the company
declared bankruptcy twice in recent years as its revenues gradually
fell. Many critics blamed the company’s net loss of $1.1 billion in FY
2012 on its failure to diversify into more healthy snacks. The company’s most recent court filing asks New York-based bankruptcy
Judge Robert Drain to give final approval of managements plans to
liquidate its assets. If
approved, the move would be the final defeat for the company’s union,
which saw Judge Drain order significant concessions from the workers
earlier this month. In addition to laying off more than 18,000 workers, the company
stopped contributing to its union pension plans some time ago and now
owes workers more than $111 million. Gregory Rayburn, the company’s interim CEO, told The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday
that more than 80 firms have lined up to buy out the company’s assets,
in a series of sales that could pull in more than $1 billion. It is
possible that the unionized workers could be hired on by one of those
other companies.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Breaking news from the Washington Post: A Romney advisor thinks Mitt Romney did, like, so awesome in this election, and we should all feel really good about the future of the Republican Party.Quit thinking Republicans suck, we only lost the biggest election in
the country, says Stuart Stevens, chief Romney strategist (and
occasional employee of child-soldier commanders):

On Nov. 6, Mitt Romney carried the majority of every
economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household
income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters.

Yes, yes: Romney did so well! He got a majority among people who have
a bunch of money, which was his only market, so good for him. We still
do not have to pay attention to those pesky lower-middle-class
households; they’re unreachable. Ditto 96 percent of blacks.Let us peruse the rest of the column for a straight, unbiased analysis of the Romney strategy, from the Romney strategist. READ MORE »

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

In his new book, magician Penn Jillette, who has been on Celebrity Apprentice twice says the show is fake and there are no rules -- and that Donald Trump decides the rules as he goes on.And the more you suck up to him, the more likely you are to go further in the game. Penn is on the All-Stars edition, or he was actually.He suddenly was fired when news of his book's revelations started to
leak. He also said that the boardroom scenes which only air a few
minutes each episode take hours and hours to film because Donald loves
listening to himself talk and thinks that everyone should also enjoy
listening to him talk.The talking has nothing to do with the show or who is going to get
fired, which really only does take a few minutes. Penn says he spent 22
hours in the span of six weeks listening to Donald's speeches.

Monday, November 26, 2012

The 129 Bangladeshis who died in a fire caused by poor fire safety
conditions in their garment factory should be thankful for their jobs,
according to Fox Business host Charles Payne. Speaking with Neil Cavuto
on Fox News this Monday, Payne excused this Sunday’s fire as a rare
event and labelled all critics of the unsafe conditions that contributed
to the tragedy as anti-Capitalist:

PAYNE: It is tragic. I don’t think something like this will happen again. Don’t
think that the people in Bangladesh who perished didn’t want or need
those jobs, as well. I know we like to victimize everyone in this
country, particularly when it comes to for-profit motivation, which is
being assaulted. But, you know, it is a tragedy but I think it
is a stretch, an amazing stretch, to sort of try to pin this on Walmart
but, of course, the unions in this country are desperate.

The Bangladeshi factory in question, Tazreen Factories, had no
functioning extinguishers, locked the exits, and employed managers who
told factory workers to go back to their stations when the fire alarm went off. Since 2006, over 200 people have died in Bangladeshi garment factories as a consequence of the substandard safety precautions prevalent in their factory. Some believe
companies like Walmart — whose brands were found in the burnt factory —
would move if production at the faculty were more expensive; that is,
if things like basic safety precautions were implemented.During his defense of the factory, Payne referred to himself as “a
spokesman for capitalism and the American Dream” and said “for a lot of
people, this [Walmart business practice] is a step in the right
direction.”

Floridians endured election chaos and marathon voting lines this year, largely thanks to reduced early voting hours, voter purges, and voter registration restrictions pushed by Republican legislators. In an exclusive report
by the Palm Beach Post, several prominent Florida Republicans are now
admitting that these election law changes were geared toward suppressing
minority and Democratic votes. Former governor Charlie Crist (R-FL) and former GOP chairman Jim
Greer (R-FL), as well as several current GOP members, told the Post that
Republican consultants pushed the new measures as a way to suppress
Democratic voters. Crist expanded early voting hours in 2008 despite
party pressure, but Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) targeted early voting almost
immediately when he took office in 2011. Scott’s administration claimed
the new laws were meant to curb in-person voter fraud, despite the fact
that an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.Current party members and consultants confirmed the motive was not to
stop voter fraud but to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to
vote:

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal.
“In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the
increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were
doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in
2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close,
but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch
said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative
seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.Another GOP consultant, who did not want to be named, also confirmed that influential
consultants to the Republican Party of Florida were intent on beating
back Democratic turnout in early voting after 2008.[...]A GOP consultant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution said black voters were a concern. “I
know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of
their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches
organize themselves,” he said.

Though the state ultimately went to President Obama, the Republican
effort to suppress votes was largely successful. A post-election report
found that new voting restrictions led to a huge increase in provisional ballots, which are cast when there is some question of the voter’s eligibility. While crying voter fraud, the Florida GOP had to confront its own
scandal when a voter registration firm they hired turned in hundreds of
fraudulent registration forms in several Florida counties. The GOP
hastily cut ties with the group when the state opened a criminal investigation into their operations.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author who is acclaimed for his military
expertise had his interview abruptly ended on Monday after he accused
Fox News of “operating as the wing of Republican Party” because the
September attacks in Benghazi had been “hyped by this network
especially.”Fox News host Jon Scott noted that Tom Ricks had “spent decades
covering our military” as he invited the author to analyze why Sen. John
McCain (R-AZ) seemed to be backing away from his threat to block U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice’s potential nomination to
become the next secretary of state. “I think that Benghazi was generally hyped by this network
especially,” Ricks explained. “And now that the [2012 presidential]
campaign is over, I think [McCain] is backing off a little bit. They’re
not going to stop Susan Rice from being secretary of state.”At
that point, Scott shifted the interview’s focus from McCain to
defending his employer, asking Ricks, “How do you call that hype” when
four Americans died in the Benghazi attacks? “How many security contractors died in Iraq, do you know?” Ricks wondered. “I don’t,” Scott admitted, seemingly at a loss for words.“No, nobody does because nobody cared,” Ricks pointed out. “Several
hundred died but there was never an official count done of security
contractors dead in Iraq. So when I see this focus on what was
essentially a small fire fight, I think — number one — I’ve covered a
lot of fire fights, it’s impossible find out what happened in them
sometimes.”“And second, I think the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely
political, partly because Fox was operating as wing of the Republican
Party,” the author added. “Alright, Tom Ricks, thanks for joining us today,” Scott said, ending the interview less than two minutes after it began. “You’re welcome,” Ricks smiled. Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum observed last week that the “Fox News effect” was reflected in a recent Pew poll which showed that 21 percent more Republicans than Democrats were “closely following” the Benghazi story. “The only segment of the country that really cares about the sham
Benghazi scandal is Republicans, and the reason Republicans are riled up
about it is because of Fox News,” Drum wrote.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Right now, President Obama is working with leaders of both parties in
Washington to reduce the deficit in a balanced way so we can lay the
foundation for long-term middle-class job growth and prevent your taxes
from going up.This is the President’s plan, but he’s not wedded to every detail. He
is determined to work with Congress to find compromise and common
ground. His guiding principle throughout this debate will be what’s best
for the middle class. He’ll be fighting for you.These problems are challenging, but they're solvable. In fact, the
Senate has already passed a bill to keep your taxes low, and the House
needs to pass it and Congress should get it to the President as soon as
possible. There's a lot at stake, and with your help we'll continue to
move this country forward.Share this and spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.

Lyrics:Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bedLay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bedWhatever colors you have in your mindI'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bedStay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhileUntil the break of day, let me see you make him smileHis clothes are dirty but his hands are cleanAnd you're the best thing that he's ever seen.

Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhileWhy wait any longer for the world to beginYou can have your cake and eat it tooWhy wait any longer for the one you loveWhen he's standing in front of you.

Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bedStay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still aheadI long to see you in the morning lightI long to reach for you in the nightStay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead.

Lyrics:"There must be some way out of here" said the joker to the thief"There's too much confusion", I can't get no reliefBusinessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earthNone of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

"No reason to get excited", the thief he kindly spoke"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a jokeBut you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fateSo let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late".

All along the watchtower, princes kept the viewWhile all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growlTwo riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

The Republicans’ new focus of attack in the faux “Benghazi-gate”
scandal is Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper,
claiming that he lied about the source of changes to talking points on
the Benghazi attack given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.Yesterday, a DNI spokesperson debunked
accusations made by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other Republicans that
the White House changed Rice’s Benghazi talking points, saying that it
was the intelligence community that made the “substantive” changes to
the talking points. Moreover, former CIA head David Petraeus and other
top intelligence officials have said there was no politicization of the process and that the talking points were not altered to minimize the role of extremists but to reflect the best intelligence at the time. McCain appeared to accept the new information but wondered why
Clapper and other DNI officials did not provide this information during
closed door hearings last week. And now that all their earlier attacks
on Rice have fell apart, Republicans and conservative media figures are
directing their attacks at Clapper, a George W. Bush appointee:

– BILL O’REILLY: Now it’s James Clapper, President
Obama’s national security guy who is saying, “Oh, it’s me. I sent Rice
out there and I took out all the al Qaeda stuff.” I’m not buying it.
None of this adds up. … All right so there’s a lot of lying going on here.– CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I’m not buying it because the
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that a week ago in
classified testimony that same Clapper said that they had no idea who
changed the talking points and now a week later he seems to say he did?
That’s kind of strange. I mean I’ve seen amnesia in my day in my
clinical days and that one is pretty quick, one week.– TUCKER CARLSON: I hate to think that the director of National Intelligence lied, is a liar. But I’m not sure I see an alternate explanation. Apparently, he’s contradicting what he testified to just last week. Is there another explanation for this?”– FOX NEWS’ STEVE DOOCY: They did say it is out of the [DNI] office.
It’s not him per se, so we’re supposed to believe that a Clapper aide
changed what Petraeus had said? That’s very, very curious.– REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC): This is the head of our national intelligence and he changed his mind within the course of 24 hours. So how are you possibly going to have any confidence in what he says?

And while Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) didn’t call Clapper a liar, he
told Fox News’ Stuart Varney that he now might be involved in the
alleged cover up:

GINGREY: Now have you got someone who basically can trump
the CIA, especially if the president says to him — I am not suggesting
that he did, but he could have — look, James, we need to kind of clean this up a little bit..
We are doing really well. We’re right about time for the election and
we are doing very well on national security and this could blow our
cover.

The right wing has spent months trying to bring down the Obama
administration in politicization the attacks in Benghazi that left four
Americans dead and after all of their conspiracytheories and baselessattackshave been debunked, the rabbit hole appears to have led to Clapper and who knows where it will end.

Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation and a guy who just loves
the Constitution of the United States so much that he wakes up every
morning with patriojizz all over his 2nd-amendment footie pajamas, published a brilliant plan the other day that had the potential to actually save America from the tragedy of national suicide represented by the reelection of gay black crack addict Barack Hussein Obama. And the best part about it? The plan invoked a Top Secret Loophole in the Constitution itself to save the Constitution! How neat is that? And it would have worked, too, if it weren’t for that darn Constitution.Still, you have to admit he is one earnest little teabagger:

We have one last, final chance to save America. We have one last, final chance to stop Barack Obama. One final chance.

So if you believe in the Constitution Fairy, clap your hands!!! READ MORE »

So, Mr. O’Reilly here is really cheesed at You People for calling him a racist. All he did was point out that Barack Obama was reelected by a bunch of poor nonwhite people who
want productive white Americans to give them All The Things, and then
people started calling him bad names. Like “racist,” which is certainly a
new one for Bill O’Reilly that he has never been called before! But
look, children, Mitt Romney came out just a week after the election and said pretty much the same things himself, as Mr. O’Reilly points out. It’s just the truth! Nobody called Romney a racist (sure they did! Really! More than once!), but Romney also didn’t actually come out and say “White America is over, man.” He just implied it, like. READ MORE »

Hmmm, it looks like your Wonkette didn’t bother to write even the
littlest thing about two-time-Senate-loser and Wrasslin’ Lady Linda
McMahon this time around, probably because we had used up all our
folding-chair jokes the first time around,
and also probably because we didn’t care. But in fact, it is AFTER her
(second) loss that Linda McMahon has become interesting! And how has she
done that? Well, once she’d blown $100 million of her own money on her
two (losing) campaigns, it seems she didn’t have enough left over to pay
the uniformly low-income and African American folks who had been her
(low-wage) fake-supporters, so they just waited and waited. But then
they told the press “hey this rich lady isn’t bothering to pay us!” So
THEN they got checks with a condom in the envelope, so’s they could fuck
themselves! AND THEN THE CHECKS BOUNCED ANYWAY. Oh man. READ MORE »

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) today issued a statement essentially
conceding that he was wrong in accusing the White House of changing U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points on Benghazi for political
purposes. Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers last week that the
CIA’s assessment that al Qaeda was responsible for the Sept. 11 attack
that killed four Americans in Benghazi was taken out of Rice’s talking
points after an interagency review. McCain and his allies then claimed
the White House took out the talking points because it supposedly
undercut the Obama administration’s narrative that it had severely
weakened al Qaeda. But Intelligence officials told
CNN yesterday that the intelligence community was responsible for the
changes made to Rice’s talking points. The Director of National
Intelligence spokesperson said that the White House did not make any
“substantive changes.” McCain responded
today and instead of taking issue with the substance of the report, the
Arizona Republican wondered why administration and intelligence
officials didn’t offer this information in closed door sessions:

“I participated in hours of hearings in the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence last week regarding the events in Benghazi,
where senior intelligence officials were asked this very question, and
all of them – including the Director of National Intelligence himself – told us that they did not know who made the changes. Now we have to read the answers to our questions in the media.
There are many other questions that remain unanswered. But this latest
episode is another reason why many of us are so frustrated with, and
suspicious of, the actions of this Administration when it comes to the
Benghazi attack.”

Of course, it’s possible that the officials did not know who changed
the talking points when McCain and other lawmakers asked last week, and
later made inquires into the matter. But McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Republicans,
has lead a proverbial witch hunt against the Obama administration and
Rice, claiming that the administration deliberately misled the public
about the nature of the attacks. Today’s news comes just a week after McCain went on national television and claimed that Rice’s “talking points came from the White House, not from the DNI.” He added
on Fox that “I think it’s patently obvious that the talking points that
Ambassador Rice had didn’t come from the CIA. It came from the White
House.” For weeks, McCain has lambasted the administration for engaging in “either a cover-up or the worst kind of incompetence” on the Benghazi attack. McCain also said
last week that “[e]verybody knew that it was an al Qaeda attack and she
continued to tell the world through all of the talk shows [on Sept. 16]
that it was a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ sparked by a video.”McCain has also said he would block
the nomination of Rice for Secretary of State, should the President
choose her, saying he would “do everything in my power to block her,”
that Rice is “not qualified” for the position and that “she should have
known better.” He subsequently said he would bock any nominee Obama put forward. But now that every angle of McCain’s attacks have been completely
debunked, all he has left is to complain about not being told that
intelligence officials didn’t give him this information sooner.

So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington's favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.He might get away with it; but I hope not.The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up;
it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted,
"scored" by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the
poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way,
plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means
unspecified.His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing
that there was a role -- as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative
-- that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so
that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on
the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a
budget wonk. It wasn't a very good impersonation -- in fact, he's pretty
bad at budget math. But the "centrists" saw what they wanted to see.Ryan
can't be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he
chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should
be with no illusions. Fool me once ...

We’ve been suspicious about possible voter fraud ever since effeminate numbers demon Nate Silver had a vision during his Pagan Rituals
of a comfortable Obama reelection. With the weight of those
mathematical odds in your favor, you’d almost be forced to resort to
stuffing ballot boxes to remain in office.Good thing there’s an edgy, investigative media group with a passion
for journalistic integrity willing to blow the top off this thing!
It’s natural to be uncomfortable with the truth, and we advise against proceeding if you’re not ready to have your mind blown.
It ain’t easy to put down the Kool-Aid when you’re thirsty – but if
you’re like us, and you want to quench that thirst with something purer,
head over to Barackofraudo.com.They aren’t afraid to make daring arguments few others seem willing
to touch. For example, why hasn’t anyone else made the case for using
vague hearsay to determine truth?

…so the evidence is often quite circumstantial. In fact, often the circumstantial evidence is all the evidence we have…

Look, sometimes finding the kind of evidence that proves a theory beyond reasonable doubt is super hard,
and you just have to make a judgment with monumental implications based
on some circumstantial stuff. That’s not to say there isn’t any
concrete evidence.

…tens of thousands of bogus votes in the ballot box, we
didn’t see someone actually put them there, but they are found, they are
there, and they are clearly evidence of vote fraud.

Evidences are found, guys. There really isn’t an argument to be made
against that. We’re left to fear the worst – the end of Democracy as we
know it, eagerly watching this horrifying story develop as the Barack
O’Fraudo team works to add a few hundred more words to their page.Also included is a link to this insightful report, which exposes how the “black Dems” stuffed ballot boxes full of Russian money to rig the 2008 election.

Intelligence officials told CNN
that the intelligence community, not the White House, changed the now
infamous Benghazi talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice
before her appearance on several morning news shows in September. CNN
quoted both the spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence
and an anonymous official “familiar with the drafting of the talking
points.” The DNI spokesperson said that the only “substantive changes”
came from the intelligence community and not the White House. Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers in a closed door
hearing last week that the CIA’s original assessment on the Sept. 11
Benghazi attack was that it was carried out by al Qaeda affiliated
groups. But he reportedly said that analysis was later taken out after
an interagency review in favor of a more general assessment that
“extremists” carried out the attack to broaden the scope and not tip off terrorists to U.S. knowledge on the matter. And despite the fact that Petraeus said the CIA approved the change, Republicans, led by Republican senators
John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH), have
accused the White House of stripping the language for political reasons.But Shawn Turner, the spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, told CNN that it wasn’t the White House’s decision:

“The intelligence community made substantive, analytical changes before
the talking points were sent to government agency partners for their
feedback. There were no substantive changes made to the talking points after they left the intelligence community.”

Another anonymous intelligence official echoed Turner, saying that the changes were made based on legitimate intelligence and for legal purposes:

“First, the information about individuals linked to al
Qaeda was derived from classified sources. Second, when links were so
tenuous – as they still are – it makes sense to be cautious before pointing fingers so you don’t set off a chain of circular and self-reinforcing assumptions. Third, it is important to be careful not to prejudice a criminal investigation in its early stages.”

Indeed, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told the New York Timeslast week
that in his closed door briefing, Petraeus “was adamant there was no
politicization of the process, no White House interference or political
agenda.” The fight over the talking points will most likely continue; it has even become a campaign cause for Republican senators like Lindsey Graham. Others like John McCain have vowed to do “everything” to block the potential nomination of Susan Rice for Secretary of State. But Democrats in Congress and media commentators are beginning
to wonder why Republicans are picking a substance-free fight with Rice,
a woman and an African-American, after the drubbing they took in last
month’s elections among those demographics.

Monday, November 19, 2012

It’s been roughly twenty minutes
since our boy Donald Q. Worthington Trump has been in the news, so
here’s some background in case you’re unfamiliar with the underreported
saga of everyone’s favorite honey-tinted quaff:The Donald is a massively successful
businessman who owns pretty much everything you could imagine owning.
Trump is also a popular dissident against a government so radically
Socialist it prevents people from being free and owning things. He
mastered the art of smelling Kenyans in the late ’90s atop a mountain in
Nepal, huddled around a stack of King magazines while sniffing sample
patches of sandalwood cologne. Since then he’s achieved enlightenment,
reaching the level of MASTER BIRTHER. And he would have been President
too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their stupid dog.So what’s The Donald up to now? Sticking it to the LIBRIL FASCISTS by ignoring those pesky and oppressive laws that require restaurants to serve people safe food,
that’s what! Sure, the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas had its
steakhouse shut down temporarily after logging 51 health code violations
during a regular inspection, but can youprove they weren’t planted by the Obama cartel?
Besides, we’re positive it’s still the best place on The Strip to
mumble about government takeovers with a mouth full of moldy yogurt.
Five stars for that, right? READ MORE »

Friday, November 16, 2012

Today, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet
desert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be
shuttering after more than eighty years of production. But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall
of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was
filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it
actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’
compensation by as much as 80 percent. At the time, creditors warned that the decision signaled an attempt to “sidestep”
bankruptcy rules, potentially as a means for trying to keep the
executive at a failing company. The Confectionery, Tobacco Workers &
Grain Millers International Union pointed this out in their written reaction to the news that the business is closing:

BCTGM members are well aware that as the company
was preparing to file for bankruptcy earlier this year, the then CEO of
Hostess was awarded a 300 percent raise (from approximately $750,000 to
$2,550,000) and at least nine other top executives of the company
received massive pay raises. One such executive received a pay
increase from $500,000 to $900,000 and another received one taking his
salary from $375,000 to $656,256.

Certainly, the company agreed to an out-sized pension debt,
but the decision to pay executives more while scorning employee
contracts during a bankruptcy reflects a lack of good managerial
judgement. It also follows a trend of rising CEO pay
in times of economic difficulty. At the manufacturing company
Caterpillar, for example, they froze workers’ pay while boosting their
CEO’s pay to $17 million. And at Citigroup, CEO Vikram Pandit received $6.7 million for crashing his company, walking off with $260 million after the business lost 88 percent of its value.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) flashed his temper on Thursday morning when
confronted with questions from a reporter regarding the former
Republican presidential nominee's absence from a briefing on the
September terrorist attacks at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.According to CNN, most Republican members of the Senate committee in
charge of investigating the attacks were absent from the classified
briefing, which was led by Obama administration officials on Wednesday.
On the same day, McCain held a Capitol Hill press conference to call for
a special investigation of the attacks and also took to the Senate
floor to issue a blistering criticism of President Obama's handling of
the situation in Benghazi. Approached by CNN's Ted Barrett on Thursday, McCain said he had no
comment on his schedule or "how I spend my time to the media." When
Barrett pressed McCain, the senator became agitated.From CNN:

Asked why he wouldn't comment, McCain grew agitated: "Because I have
the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to
tell me I can or not?”When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the
senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, "I'm upset that you
keep badgering me."While McCain refused to shed light on why he didn't show, his
spokesman Brian Rogers emailed CNN a short time later with an
explanation. He blamed it on a "scheduling error" but wouldn't provide
any more detail......

Conservative
radio host Glenn Beck is accusing of President Barack Obama’s
administration of a manufacturing former CIA Director David Petraeus’
sex scandal as a plot to “discredit the military.”“This is a set up,” Beck said on his Tuesday broadcast. “This is
spontaneous, they just found out? Bull crap. They have known. The White
House knew during the vetting process that Petraeus was carrying on an
inappropriate relationship. They knew it. They knew that he could be
easily compromised, but they appointed him anyway.”“Because when you have the goods on someone — you need a pressure
point,” he explained. “Just like this Jill [Kelley] lady. She’s got $2
million in debt. She’s in and out of court all the time. Pressure point.
Same with the general. ‘General Betray Us,’ that’s what the left used
to call him. Now, he’s put up to head the CIA? Really? Of course. They
have a pressure point.”“And
now he’s being discredited. This whole scandal is doing what? How’s
your opinion of the military? Discredit the last-standing, honorable
institution we have: the military.”Beck added: “These people in Washington are really bad people. And
they will use anything, any pressure point. And you will fold. This,
today, is all about discrediting the military while distracting the
media.”A video of Beck’s full 20-minute, conspiracy-filled rant can be viewed here.

Charlie
Webster, the chairman of Maine’s Republican Party, sees “dozens of
black people” voting on Nov. 6 as evidence of voter fraud because
“nobody in town knows anyone who’s black.”In an interview with WCSH’s Don Carrigan earlier this week, Webster said that Democrats were winning elections because they blocked an effort by the Republican Party to repeal same-day voter registration, which requires an ID and proof of residency.“Let’s just look at what happened on Tuesday,” he explained. “I mean,
literally hundreds of new people came in. We don’t know if they’re
residents or not but they came in and voted. And there’s no way of
knowing that.”“In
some parts of the state — for example, in some parts of rural Maine,
there were dozens — dozens of black people who came in and voted
election day. Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows
anybody that’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know, but we’re going
to find out.”When Carrigan pressed the party chairman for specifics about where
fraud occurred, he vaguely referred to “several rural Maine towns” and
promised an investigation to find out more. “What I’m doing is purchasing a post card, we’re going to mail it in
and thank people for registering to vote and see whether it comes back,”
Webster said. “So, you think the Democrats bussed in people?” Carrigan asked. “I just think that the system, without some kind of an ID or without
some kind of way to check, is fraught for abuse,” Webster insisted. “I’m
just telling you my personal opinion. I believe it’s a problem.”Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan also recently pointed to African-American turnout to explain his loss to President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.“We were surprised with the outcome,” the Wisconsin Republican told WISC-TV’s Jessica Arp.
“We knew this was going to be a close race. We thought we had a very
good chance of winning it. I think that the surprise was some of the
turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which definitely
gave President Obama the big margin to win this race.”Watch this video from WCSH via Think Progress, broadcast Nov. 13, 2012.

This week, a number of Republican senators have strongly criticized the
administration for failing to properly explain the circumstances
surrounding the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Some of
those senators failed to show up for a briefing on the attack
Wednesday.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been the leading congressional critic of
the administration's handling of the Benghazi attack and what he sees
as the administration's lack of candor with Congress on the matter. On
Wednesday, he pledged to block the potential nomination of U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton due
to Rice's statements on the attack. That drew a sharp rebuke from
President Barack Obama at Wednesday's press conference.

But although McCain had time to speak on the Senate floor and on
television about the lack of information provided to Congress about the
attack, he didn't attend the classified briefing for senators Wednesday
given to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee, of which he is a member.
Committee ranking Republican Susan Collins (R-ME) called out McCain
for skipping the briefing and said his call for a special committee to
investigate the Benghazi attack was not necessary because the Homeland
Security committee could handle it.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), "who was there at briefing, and Senator
McCain, who was not, are members of our committee, and I know they would
play very important roles," Collins told Politico.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), another Homeland Security committee member
who was on television complaining about the lack of Benghazi
information, also did not show up for the Wednesday hearing. Paul did a
CNN interview from the Capitol building Wednesday in which said he had
questions about the anti-Islam video, the lack of Marines in Libya, and
diplomatic security. At one point he says, "I don't know enough of the
details."

The closed and classified briefing included representatives from the
State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
the National Counterterrorism Center, and the FBI, an administration
official said. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a classified
hearing on Benghazi on Tuesday and the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence will hold one Thursday, but McCain and Paul are not members
of either of those committees.
"If you want answers, a good first step is to show up and ask a
question," an administration official told The Cable. "That's what a
senator does." ................

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

President Obama is giving Republicans in Congress a tough assignment:
If you don’t want marginal tax rates on top earners to go up, bring me
an alternative way to raise $1 trillion in revenue without burdening the
middle class.Politically and mathematically speaking, it’s a nearly impossible
task. And moreover, Obama said he won’t allow Republicans to use dubious
conservative theories about tax cuts, or vague promises of future
action, to meet it. But importantly, it’s also a way for him to enter
negotiations with House Republicans without appearing to have closed
himself off to any compromise. “What I have told leaders privately as well as publicly is that
we can not afford to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy,” he told
reporters at his first post-election press conference at the White
House. “When it comes to the top two percent what I’m not going to do is
extend further a tax cut for folks who don’t need it.”But Obama hedged ever so slightly, to allow Republicans to figure out
an alternative path toward the same revenue goal with the same
distributional impact — a task that’s eluded independent tax experts for
years. “It is very difficult to see how you make up that trillion dollars,
if we are serious about deficit reduction, just by closing loopholes and
deductions,” Obama cautioned. “The math tends not to work.”In other words, Republicans will have to come up with something new
and unexpected if they’re going to avoid higher tax rates on high income
Americans. “I just want to emphasize that I am open to new ideas,” he said in
response to a followup question. “If our Republican counterparts or some
Democrats have a great idea for raising revenue, maintaining
progressivity, and making sure the middle-class is not getting hit,
reduces our deficit and encourages growth, I am not just going to slam
the door in their face.” But that’s predicated on Republicans genuinely ponying up real — not
illusory — revenue. And he’s under no illusions that it can be done
easily without raising tax rates. “What I will not do, I will not have a process that is vague, that
says we are going to sort of, kind of, raise revenue and do dynamic
scoring or closing loopholes that have not been identified,” Obama said,
referring to supply side theories that suggest cutting tax rates
creates enough economic growth to offset revenue losses. “The reason I
won’t do that is because I don’t want to find ourselves in a position
six months from now or a year from now where, lo and behold, the only
way to close the deficit is to sock it to middle-class families…. That
is my concern. I am less concerned about red lines, per se.”Obama was reluctant to boast of having earned a broad governing
mandate from the public. But he noted that taxes were the most central
issue to his campaign.“This should not be a surprise to anyone…. The majority of voters
agreed with me,” Obama said. “More voters agreed with me on this issue
than voted for me.”His broad pitch to Congress is thus: increase the tax revenue base by
modestly raising taxes on the wealthy. Then once that new baseline is
set, he’ll negotiate broader tax and spending reforms with party
leaders. “We don’t want the middle-class taxes to go up. Let’s go ahead and
lock them in,” Obama said. “Let’s also then commit ourselves to a
broader package of deficit reduction. That includes entitlement changes
and it includes potential tax reform. As well as I am able to look at
discretionary spending on that side. I want a big deal, a comprehensive
deal…. But right now I want to make sure of is the taxes on middle-class
families don’t go up. And there is a very easy way to do that. We could
get it done by next week.”

TPMMitt Romney has a simple explanation for donors as to why his
presidential campaign came up short: President Obama gave out too much
stuff. According to reports in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times,
the former Republican nominee said during a call with donors on
Wednesday that Obama had been “very generous” in doling out “big gifts”
to “the African American community, the Hispanic community and young
people” as well as to women throughout his first term. Benefits such as
access to “free health care,” guaranteed contraceptive coverage, more
affordable student loans, and “amnesty for children of illegals,” all
combined to give the president a decisive edge in popularity.“The President’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big
gift — so he made a big effort on small things,” Romney said. “Those
small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”His explanation contained strong echoes of a leaked fundraiser tape
earlier this year in which he told campaign backers that Obama’s
strength came from the 47 percent of Americans who consider themselves
“victims” and “dependent” on government. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said at the time. At first Romney defended those remarks in a press conference, but weeks later he changed his tune and said his comments were “just completely wrong.” His latest conversations with donors suggest that he has moved closer towards his original views. Despite complaints that the Republican’s campaign missed the mark badly on polling and turnout operations,
Romney said he stood by his organization, which he called “a very solid
team that got along.” He said there was “no drama in the campaign — not
that everybody was perfect; everybody has flat sides, but we learned
how to accommodate each other’s strengths and weaknesses, to build on
the strengths.” Romney told donors that he believed up to election day that he would win. “I am very sorry that we didn’t win,” he said. “I know that you
expected to win. We expected to win. … It was very close, but close
doesn’t count in this business.”

During his first press conference since he was re-elected, President Obama today criticized the tax approach that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) and many other Congressional Republicans
have proposed. Boehner and the rest of the GOP have recently suggested
cutting tax rates, but raising more federal revenue via a combination of
closing loopholes and counting on the economic growth that tax cuts
will supposedly cause.Obama derided “dynamic scoring” — the revenue increases that
conservatives claim will occur after tax cuts — saying he would oppose
any efforts to only “sorta-kinda raise revenue”:

What I will not do is to have a process that is
vague, that says we’re going to sorta-kinda raise revenue through
dynamic scoring or closing loopholes that have not been identified.
And the reason I won’t do that is I don’t want to find ourselves in a
position six months from now or a year from now, where low-and-behold,
the only way to close the deficit is to sock it to middle-class
families...............

Obama also rejected the notion that he would accept new revenue
solely via closing deductions and eliminating loopholes for the wealthy,
and not via raising marginal tax rates.There is little evidence that tax reform that lowers rates and cuts
loopholes will spark appreciable economic growth that will increase
revenue. For instance, as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett shows,
the tax reform package of 1986 did not increase growth. Several other studies show thesame thing. As Citizens for Tax Justice added, “the highest priority of tax reform should be raising revenue — real revenue, not the voodoo-economics sort of revenue gains that Boehner mistakenly claims will come from tax-rate reductions.”

It’s completely not fair that we in the media have now turned our
considerable interest on the Kelley sistren. All they did was either get
some shitty emails from a presumed nutzoid Internet stalker, or be related
to someone who got some shitty emails from a presumed nutzoid Internet
stalker, and now here we are and the Kelley Girls are the worst people
in the entire world, or as we like to call them, ur-Republicans.
Let us delve deep into the grotesque and typically GOP-pish misdeeds of
these awful people, who are frickin’ perfect in every way. READ MORE »

One of the “fun” things about presidential elections is that every
four years there’s a new dumb thing about the process for political
junkies to yell at each other about despite the disinterest or genuine
disgust of normals, and this year it’s polling! Did Nate Silver’s
devil-math suck all the fun out of democracy, forever? Were the polls
skewed because they didn’t reflect Republican understanding of reality?
Were Gallup and Rasmussen “in the tank” for Republicans? Well, Gallup
Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport has decided to weigh in on this
controversy, and would like you to know that (a) Gallup was not
wrong, because it abruptly stopped picking Romney to win by 7 points
several days before the election, and (b) Nate Silver is a parasitic
remora clinging to the great white shark that is Gallup and if everyone
gets into the Nate Silver business the whole polling industry will collapse, and then we’ll have no polling at all, and then we’ll be sorry!READ MORE »

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Gov. Chris Christie,
a Republican who has pushed aggressively for cutting and capping taxes
in New Jersey during his three years in office, said Tuesday that people
who lived in towns destroyed by Hurricane Sandy were likely to pay higher taxes to help rebuild.

“It’s got to be paid for,” he said. “There’s no magic money tree.”

In a 40-minute news conference in Trenton, Mr. Christie said he expected
the federal government to do as much as it had done for victims of
Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast to help rebuild New Jersey. And he
said that municipalities would be allowed to raise property taxes more
than the 2 percent limit that he signed into law in 2010 to cover costs
brought on by the storm.

“No one’s ever happy with higher taxes, but the fact is, what annoys
people more than anything else is waste,” he said. “As long as they know
that the money’s being spent in a way that’s helping to bring their
town back to life, I think people will understand it’s got to be done.”

It was a striking endorsement of the role of higher taxes and the
federal government in helping the recovery, particularly coming from a
governor who has often been held up as a leader in the movement to rein
in both.

But Mr. Christie, wearing a suit and tie rather than the fleece jacket
seen in his TV appearances the last two weeks, disagreed that the storm
had brought on a change of heart. Unlike Mitt Romney, he said, he had
never questioned the need for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“Emergency response is always something that I’ve thought was an
appropriate governmental function,” he said.

“There are plenty of instances that can happen in our country where a
state by itself is not equipped to deal with the results of a natural
disaster,” he continued. “And so the country needs to band together to
help its other states to be able to get over something that has been
disproportionately foisted on one or two or three states of the 50. But
no, it hasn’t turned me from a limited-government guy to a
big-government guy.”

Mr. Christie showed little sign of backing off the 10 percent tax cut he
has been pushing all year. To pay for that cut, Mr. Christie presumed
that revenues would grow by more than 7 percent. With the state’s
unemployment rate hovering well above the national average, tax revenues
have lagged far behind those predictions. The devastation of Hurricane
Sandy — with scores of homes and businesses destroyed — has made that
growth even more unlikely.

The governor said the state treasury would release figures at the end of
this week projecting the storm’s damage to the state economy. He has
argued that as people buy things to rebuild, sales and income tax
revenues may actually increase.

But he also said that he has always known “that if something catastrophic happens, you have to adjust your position.”